Carrie Bradshaw is a menace. That’s the point.
In another major licensing grab for Netflix, HBO’s juggernaut Sex and the City officially landed on the platform this week. Older fans of the show are already anticipating the possibility of Gen-Z’s horrified reaction to the raunchy and, in some ways, culturally outdated show. Can today’s youth stomach Carrie’s confusion over bisexuality or the women’s obsession with thinness? Will “puriteens” be scandalized watching Samantha Jones hook up with a random delivery guy?
Lest we forget, Sex and the City has been available to stream for years. So the idea that teenagers and early 20-somethings have never engaged with the series before is a little presumptuous. (They’ve surely encountered some fashion inspo TikToks.) Rather, it seems like this move to Netflix has given everyone a chance to reignite the now-decades-long discourse about the show’s storylines and characters.
It’s only natural then that social media users are already firing off takes about Carrie Bradshaw. To be fair, fans are never not discussing the show’s polarizing protagonist. In the years during and after the show aired in 1998, Carrie was largely celebrated as a feminist triumph — the rare single, childless (and messy) woman in her 30s portrayed in a (somewhat) aspirational light.
“We had never seen female characters date this way or talk this way before on television,” says Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, author of Sex and the City and Us: How Four Single Women Changed the Way We Think, Live, and Love. “Carrie was at its center, which is a position often reserved for the sane, grounded, most relatable one.”
However, the 2010s saw a wave of essays and criticism reevaluating her character — mostly by emphasizing her more annoying qualities — which the show occasionally downplayed. Was Carrie ever the ideal image of female independence, or just a self-absorbed, self-destructive nightmare?
In 2024, the latter opinion has become more of a default perspective, and the primary lens through which many fans seem to enjoy the show. How did this anti-Carrie sentiment come to consume so much of the discourse surrounding SATC — a lighthearted but textually rich show with an abundance of interesting talking points, a slew of actual villains, and three other complex main characters?
Is Carrie Bradshaw really that bad?
On one hand, the nonstop Carrie criticisms feel a bit reflexive, more like a meme than an actual analysis of merit. On the other hand, she’s given audiences a lot to be frustrated with over six seasons, from her surprising prudishness to her pathetic longing for her main love interest, Mr. Big.
Critics tend to highlight her self-centered tendencies, including cheating on her boyfriend Aidan and having an affair with Big while he was engaged to another woman. Vox’s Alex Abad-Santos writes that Carrie’s essentially the blueprint for what the internet has labeled “main character syndrome,” citing a season four episode — one I consider useless plot filler — where she expected her friend Charlotte to sell her engagement ring to loan her thousands of dollars.
More recent TikToks and tweets have used Carrie as an informal case study in insufferable and even “toxic” behavior. In one TikTok, songwriter and content creator Kady Brown (@KadyzRoxz), who makes videos about relationships and mental health, argues that Carrie surpasses the threshold of a “complicated character.” Rather, she considers her a “master manipulator” and “narcissist.”
@kadyroxz What if I told you Carrie & Big were equally yoked? #satc #carriebradshaw #femalefriendship #narcissisticabuse
♬ original sound - KadyRoxz
Brown, 30, tells Vox that she first watched SATC when she was 22. However, in revisiting the show in her late 20s with a “fully developed frontal lobe,” she was met with “an undeniable ick of Carrie.”
“I love the series,” she says. “I love most of the women. But, as a proper adult who believes she’s done her healing work, nothing could divorce me from the idea that Carrie has to be stopped!”
Brown says, in her rewatch, she was mainly struck by the way Carrie argues with her friends, and she sees the character as an “externalizer.”
“Carrie’s weaponized Miranda’s trust issues to avoid accountability in conversations about Big,” she said, referencing a season three episode. “And when Charlotte told Carrie it was a mistake to have dinner with her ex-boyfriend while married to Big, Carrie brought up Charlotte’s fear of being cheated on.”
Other fans, like 30-year-old Katherine D. Morgan, an author and SATC watcher since her teens, argue that Carrie’s bad qualities are overstated within the fandom, especially compared to other faulty characters like Charlotte and Samantha — the latter of whom she says is also an “asshole.” Additionally, she says the term “narcissist” is “thrown around way too freely.”
“Carrie’s the main character, so, of course, she talks about herself a lot,” Morgan says.
“She’s a flawed human being,” she says. “Some people are bad at handling money. Some people date people who aren’t the best for them. Sometimes, those people are your best friends. So if you’re saying this person is terrible, you could also say the people you associate with are terrible.”
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Brian Ach/WireImage
The harsh reactions to Carrie’s antics are particularly interesting to see today. In 2024, the “unlikable” protagonist whose life is in shambles is a common leading archetype in many female-driven television comedies, like Sam in the Bridget Everett vehicle Somebody Somewhere or Brooke Dubek in the recently concluded The Other Two. In 2022, the New York Times noticed an increasing appetite for female protagonists “who undermine their own growth” and are “more likely to be mired in failure than striving toward wedding rings and corner offices” — much like Carrie throughout SATC. Love her or hate her, it’s Carrie Bradshaw and her no-good decisions who is responsible for some of our favorite irresponsible women on TV.
Subsequent HBO shows like 2013’s Girls and 2016’s Insecure — as well the Emmy-winning Prime Video show Fleabag, which also premiered in 2016 — relied on this archetype and gained popularity for their honest, sometimes brutal depictions of youngish womanhood. This expectation has taken over reality TV, too. People tune into Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise primarily to watch women make bad decisions and behave in transgressive ways.
Morgan notes that the way viewers are trained to watch SATC, compared to other shows, could also have to do with this strong repulsion toward Carrie. The famous question of “Are you a Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, or Charlotte?” can make consuming the show a more self-reflective experience, like filling out a personality questionnaire.
“People think that if they can identify with Carrie that suddenly means they’re a godawful person,” Morgan says.
Viewers who initially approach the show this way may misunderstand Carrie — and the rest of the women — as characters who are solely meant to be aspirational, relatable avatars as opposed to categorical “antiheroines.” The “antihero” title is often more readily thrown at male protagonists who are violent and/or less morally ambiguous, such as Tony Soprano, Walter White, Dexter Morgan, and Don Draper — even though Carrie, as Keishin Armstrong says, came before all of them.
“She was one of TV’s first, if not the first, true TV antiheroine,” Keishin Armstrong says. “She smoked. She drank. She was absolutely excruciating to watch as she chased after Big.”
“I was longing for more flawed female characters at the time, which was still very much the era of sunny chick lit and rom-com heroines,” she says. “Their worst flaws were that they were clumsy or shopped too much.” (In Carrie’s case, being an occasional klutz and a shopping addict were the least of her problems.)
Carrie sucks. So what?
That said, it’s hard not to attribute at least some of the compulsive nitpicking of Carrie to sexist attitudes. Compared to the male mobsters on The Sopranos or Don Draper — who are babygirlified online and met with lighthearted takes about their sex appeal — there seems to be an expectation that Carrie should have a strong moral character. (When weighed against murderers and serial misogynists, she does.) She even somehow gets a worse rap than the terrible men on SATC, like Big, a middle-aged fuckboy, or Aidan, who took her back after she cheated on him just to emotionally torment her.
Overall, these repeated declarations of Carrie’s “awfulness” seem to misunderstand her flaws as a bug and not a feature of a show about a group of rich, solipsistic white women. There’s a valid argument that it’s pleasant to watch characters grow and reflect on their mistakes. For example, Carrie’s continually misguided antics in Sex and the City 2 and the Max reboot And Just Like That… feel like legitimate failures in the progression of her arc. However, watching the original series solely through anti-Carrie goggles is missing the point and half the humor of the partly surreal and ridiculous show.
Likewise, would a more refined, less “delulu” version of Carrie result in an equally compelling and outrageous series? Morgan argues no, claiming that “nothing would’ve happened” if it weren’t for Carrie acting out on her insecurities and constantly ignoring red flags. At the very least, Carrie gave viewers something to talk about and debate together.
There’s also a fine line between a character being unlikable and unwatchable. Based on the sheer amount of people who love and repeatedly watch SATC, Carrie seemingly doesn’t fit into the latter category. That also rings true for content creator Brown, who says that Carrie doesn’t entirely spoil the show for her. Maybe this is because Carrie’s less pleasant attributes largely result in self-sabotage — which she miraculously tends to bounce back from — rather than causing harm to her friends. While she’s occasionally gotten into tiffs with the other women, as they all have, she remains a well-qualified lead character in a love story about the ups and downs of female friendship.
Similarly, Morgan believes that Carrie is mostly a “good friend,” recalling how she supported Samantha during her breast cancer diagnosis and Charlotte after her miscarriage. “Everyone reaches out to her.”
On a more basic note, Keishin Armstrong says that Carrie just seems like an amusing person to have in your friend circle.
“I think of Carrie as that friend whose choices you always roll your eyes at, but you’re friends with anyway,” she says. “She gets you into good parties and clubs and always has some entertaining story about how much her life sucks, even if it’s probably her fault.”
The Michigan school shooter begged for help. His parents laughed it off.
Today, the parents of the 2021 Michigan school shooter will cross a grim legal threshold: They will be the first parents in American history to be sentenced for their own criminal responsibility in relation to a mass shooting committed by their child.
In separate trials held earlier this year, Jennifer and James Crumbley were each found guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter after their son opened fire in the hallways of his school, Oxford High School, in Michigan on November 30, 2021 — just hours after school administrators had summoned the Crumbleys to campus to alert them that their son seemed to be having violent fantasies.
The Crumbleys face up to 15 years in prison for their roles in the crime. Their son, who was 15 years old at the time of the shooting, was sentenced in December to life in prison without parole. Prosecutors have asked the judge in the trials to sentence both Crumbleys to at least 10 years.
Although the case is precedent-setting, gun rights advocates haven’t really embraced it as a cause, likely due to the troubling circumstances that led up to the shooting.
Prosecutors had argued that James and Jennifer Crumbley, both strident gun enthusiasts, enabled their son to commit the shooting in three key ways: by continually ignoring what should have been warning signs regarding his mental health, by purchasing a firearm they intended for him to illegally own, and by failing to secure the gun away from him — even after school officials alerted them to the problem.
In other words, the very facts that made prosecutors charge the Crumbleys and handed them their precedent-setting convictions might also limit that precedent’s reach.
The Michigan shooter’s parents ignored an alarming series of warning signs — and arguably enabled their son’s violence
According to an independent report released by the school district in October, multiple people failed at multiple points to prevent the 2021 shooting.
For months prior, the Crumbleys’ son, Ethan Crumbley, repeatedly asked his parents for help handling his mental health and showed signs of depression and mental illness. In texts sent to them, for example, he exhibited growing paranoia and complained multiple times of seeing ghosts or demons in their home when he was alone. But the Crumbleys ignored or dismissed his concerns.
“I actually asked my dad to take [me] to the Doctor yesterday but he just gave me some pills and told me to ‘Suck it up,’” Ethan texted a friend in April 2021.
“My mom laughed when I told her.”
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Courtesy Detroit Police
Four days before the shooting, James Crumbley took his son with him to buy a gun, a Sig Sauer 9mm that prosecutors argued they intended for their son’s personal use, despite him being well under 18, the legal age for gun ownership in Michigan.
One day before the shooting, Ethan was caught at school looking up bullets to use with the gun and was disciplined. Instead of expressing concern, his mother joked over text, “lol I’m.not mad. you have to learn not.to.get caught.”
The morning the shooting occurred, Ethan accessed the gun and took it to school in his backpack. Later, a schoolteacher alerted authorities after he drew a collection of disturbing images on a math worksheet, including a gun very similar to the Sig Sauer his father had just bought. Next to the gun, he sketched a person who appeared to be riddled with bullet wounds. Below it, he wrote, “The thoughts won’t stop — help me,” along with other messages like “blood everywhere” and “my life is useless.”
Despite these indicators, neither James nor Jennifer alerted the school to the fact they had just purchased a gun similar to the one shown in the drawing. They left him at the school and went back to their jobs, without returning home to make sure the gun was still secured. School administrators neglected to search Ethan’s backpack, where the gun was still hidden.
A few hours after this meeting, the Crumbleys received reports of the school shooting and immediately began frantically messaging him. “He must be the shooter,” Crumbley texted her boss.
By then, however, it was too late to intervene.
The Crumbleys are the first parents to be held criminally responsible for their role in a child’s mass shooting
Again, this is a precedent-setting case.
Michigan prosecutor Karen McDonald told CBS News after James Crumbley’s trial in March that she hadn’t initially been thinking about what precedents did or didn’t exist, but that the facts of the case led her to the decision to prosecute. “The very first question I asked was, ‘Where did he get that gun, and how did he get it?’ And that question led to some really disturbing facts,” she said. “I think it’s a rare set of facts, but I also think that we don’t ask the question enough.”
The Crumbleys’ lawyers fought the case’s legality from the start — arguing there was no justification for bringing charges against parents for the actions of their son, and that the decision to press charges could lead to overzealous prosecution of gun owners in the future. But a state appellate court ruled that the trials could move forward, pointing out that Ethan Crumbley’s actions were “reasonably foreseeable.”
Even as it did so, however, the court acknowledged it was an unusual case.
Prosecutors argued that both parents failed to exercise “reasonable care” of their son, and went even further in failing to restrict his access to the gun. The Crumbleys have never admitted to buying the Sig Sauer for their son’s use, but in any case, they seemed to make only a token effort to secure the gun away from him.
Gun safety experts recommend that considerable care be taken when storing a gun away from family members — in particular, making sure the gun and the bullets are kept locked and separate from each other.
“Securing the gun is the whole thing,” James Crumbley’s anonymous jury foreman told the Detroit Free Press after his verdict in March.
While the extraordinary circumstances of this case make it unlikely that every parent of a school shooter could face prosecution, the Michigan shooter shares plenty of common red flags with other school shooters that parents should be alert to. The Crumbleys have claimed ignorance, but they’ve also reportedly shown a lack of remorse, with James Crumbley claiming to be a “martyr” for the cause of gun rights.
Jurors clearly disagreed. “It’s not gonna fix nothing,” James Crumbley’s jury foreman said after his verdict. “It’s just a start … it’s a start of things.”
This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.
A federal law requires hospitals to provide abortions when necessary to prevent serious health consequences. The justices could neutralize that law.
Moyle v. United States should have been a very easy case.
A federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), requires nearly all hospitals to provide “such treatment as may be required to stabilize the medical condition” of “any individual” who arrives at the hospital’s ER with an “emergency medical condition.” Though the law does not specifically mention abortions, EMTALA is written in capacious terms — requiring covered hospitals to perform an emergency abortion when that is the appropriate treatment to resolve a patient’s medical emergency.
And yet, last January, the Supreme Court effectively nullified EMTALA, at least for patients who require abortion. Moyle, which the Court will hear the last full week of April, asks whether this nullification should be made permanent.
The case involves a conflict between the federal law and Idaho’s unusually restrictive anti-abortion statute, which permits physicians to perform an abortion when “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman,” but not when a patient’s pregnancy only threatens to disable or seriously harm them.
EMTALA, meanwhile, requires most hospitals to provide whatever care is necessary to stabilize a patient who is at risk of “serious impairment to bodily functions,” “serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part,” or other nonfatal consequences that are defined as medical emergencies by EMTALA. So, for example, if a patient’s uterus could be destroyed, but she is likely to survive if untreated, EMTALA requires hospitals to perform an abortion if terminating the pregnancy would stabilize the patient’s medical condition.
When federal law conflicts with a state’s law, the Constitution provides that the federal law “shall be the supreme Law of the Land” — and thus the state law is “preempted.” EMTALA also contains a provision stating that state and local laws must give way “to the extent that the [state law] directly conflicts with a requirement of this section.”
So, again, Moyle should be an easy case, and a federal district court ruled in 2022 that Idaho’s abortion ban must give way to EMTALA when a pregnant patient has a medical emergency that must be treated with an abortion.
Last January, however, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked this district court’s order, reinstating Idaho’s sweeping abortion ban while the justices ponder the Moyle case. That’s a strong sign that, despite EMTALA’s clear text, the justices could permanently neutralize the federal law’s protections for people who must have an abortion to avoid catastrophic medical consequences. (No justice publicly dissented from this temporary order, but justices sometimes disagree with the Court’s orders but do not note their dissent.)
Moyle is a test of whether these justices will follow the text of a clearly drafted law
EMTALA is a reasonably straightforward statute. It only applies to hospitals with emergency rooms, and only to those hospitals that accept Medicare funds. That’s most hospitals because Medicare provides health coverage to Americans over the age of 65.
The primary purpose of this law is to ensure that hospitals provide emergency medical care to patients who may not be able to pay for it. But the law is also written in expansive terms. It states that “if any individual … comes to a hospital and the hospital determines that the individual has an emergency medical condition,” the hospital typically must “stabilize the medical condition.” (In limited circumstances, the hospital may transfer the patient to another facility.)
EMTALA also defines the term “emergency medical condition” to include not just life-threatening medical conditions, but also conditions that place a patient’s health in “serious jeopardy” or that threatens serious harm to a patient’s “bodily functions” or “any bodily organ or part.”
Faced with this fairly explicit text, Idaho’s lawyers (and a separate team of lawyers representing the state’s GOP legislature) offer several arguments to justify leaving its broad abortion ban in place.
One of their main arguments is that EMTALA should be read only to prohibit “turning away indigent patients with serious medical conditions.” The Justice Department agrees that preventing hospitals from turning away such patients was Congress’s prime motive when it enacted EMTALA in 1986. But the text of the statute does not support such a narrow reading of its effects.
Both the state’s brief and the state legislature’s brief also lean heavily into a provision of federal Medicare law which provides that EMTALA should not be read “to authorize any Federal officer or employee to exercise any supervision or control over the practice of medicine or the manner in which medical services are provided.” They claim that this provision prevents EMTALA from being read to alter which medical procedures can legally be performed in Idaho.
But this argument also conflicts with the text of federal law. Even if the Court agrees that requiring doctors to perform medically necessary abortions constitutes “supervision or control over the practice of medicine,” the statutory provision Idaho points to only prohibits “any Federal officer or employee” from exercising such supervision.
No federal officer or employee — meaning, a member of the federal executive branch — has decreed that Idaho hospitals must provide emergency abortions. Rather, the Biden administration argues that Congress made this determination when it enacted EMTALA.
The anti-abortion briefs also point to several provisions of the EMTALA statute which require hospitals to offer stabilizing care to a pregnant patient’s “unborn child” if a medical emergency endangers the fetus’s life. They claim that reading the federal law to require emergency abortions would “put it at war with” its provisions protecting fetal life.
But this argument is also at odds with EMTALA’s text. The federal statute provides that a hospital meets its obligations under EMTALA if it “offers” a patient medically stabilizing treatment and “informs the individual (or a person acting on the individual’s behalf) of the risks and benefits” of that treatment.
Thus, when a pregnant patient faces a medical emergency that endangers both the patient and their fetus, the hospital’s obligation is to offer treatment that will stabilize both patients. And, in the tragic case where a patient is forced to choose between an abortion, which would stabilize their own condition, or a treatment which would save the fetus but leave the mother at risk, EMTALA requires the hospital to offer both treatments, and inform the patient of the terrible choice they must make.
And then the hospital must honor the patient’s choice, even if the state does not approve of it.
Idaho also wants the Supreme Court to fundamentally alter the balance of power between Congress and the states
Idaho’s two legal teams also make a pair of arguments that seek to weaken Congress in fundamental ways and to place novel new limits on the federal government’s ability to preempt state laws.
The first of these arguments is that EMTALA — or, at least, the Biden administration’s textualist reading of EMTALA — violates something called the “major questions doctrine.”
The major questions doctrine claims that Congress must “speak clearly” if it wishes to give a federal agency the power to decide a question of “vast ‘economic and political significance.’” This doctrine is not mentioned in the Constitution or in any federal law, and appears to have been made up entirely by Republican appointees to the Supreme Court.
Even if you accept this made-up doctrine as legitimate, however, it is not at all clear why it is relevant to the Moyle case. By its own terms, the major questions doctrine only applies when a federal agency claims the authority to decide an important policy question. But no federal agency — meaning, an agency within the Executive Branch — has made any policymaking decision of any kind in Moyle. Rather, the question is whether a law enacted by Congress requires Idaho hospitals to perform emergency abortions.
Idaho, in other words, is arguing that a made-up legal doctrine, which appears in no legal text and that was fabricated entirely by judges, should be read to limit Congress’s ability to decide important policy questions. If the Court agrees, that would be an extraordinary transfer of power from an elected Congress to an unelected judiciary.
The state’s strongest legal argument, meanwhile, turns on the fact that EMTALA’s obligations only apply to hospitals that accept federal Medicare funds.
The Supreme Court has long held that, when Congress spends money, it may impose conditions on the recipients of that money — including on state governments. So, for example, the Court held in South Dakota v. Dole (1987) that Congress may require states that accept federal highway funds to raise their drinking age to 21 (Congress thought that the roads would be safer if there were less underage drinking and driving).
In Moyle, however, the question is whether private hospitals that accept Medicare funds must perform emergency abortions. Idaho claims that, because it has not weighed in on whether to accept that funding, it has not consented to having its own state law overridden by EMTALA. And it argues that such consent is necessary for a federal spending program to override a state law.
Idaho actually does have some legal support for this argument. In Pennhurst State School & Hospital v. Halderman (1981), the Supreme Court said that a state’s decision to accept federal funds is “much in the nature of a contract: in return for federal funds, the States agree to comply with federally imposed conditions.” So that does suggest that a state need not comply with “federally imposed conditions” if it did not “agree to comply” with them.
But the Justice Department also cites many Supreme Court cases holding that Congress preempted a state law when it enacted a federal spending program that does not provide grants to states. Thus, in Coventry Health Care v. Nevils (2017), the Court held that the federal government’s decision to offer its own employees health plans that violate Missouri law preempts that state law. And in Bennett v. Arkansas (1988), the Court held that federal Social Security law overrides an Arkansas law that allowed the state to seize an incarcerated person’s Social Security benefits.
Indeed, as recently as last year, the Court held in Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski (2023) that private plaintiffs may sue to enforce provisions of federal Medicaid law that impose obligations on institutions that accept Medicaid funds. Talevski rested on the proposition that conditions attached to federal grant programs are “laws” just like any other federal law, and thus can be enforced using the same mechanism individuals would use to enforce a different law.
So, while Pennhurst offers some legal support for Idaho’s claim that EMTALA cannot modify a state law without the state’s consent, there are myriad cases supporting the opposing proposition. A justice who is determined to deny emergency abortions to patients who need them could rely on Pennhurst to achieve that result, but such a decision risks undermining countless other acts of Congress that override state laws.
The Court’s decision in Moyle is likely to determine whether some women live or die
Theoretically, Idaho’s law permits abortions when necessary to save a patient’s life. Many other states with abortion bans have broader exemptions on the books, which theoretically permit an abortion when a patient faces serious health consequences that may not be life-threatening.
In practice, however, women in many states with strict abortion bans have struggled to obtain lifesaving or otherwise medically necessary care. In one case, a Texas woman with a nonviable pregnancy was told she had to wait to receive an abortion even though her body was discharging blood clots and a strange-smelling yellow liquid, Her doctors eventually agreed to induce labor after her vagina started to emit a dark, foul-smelling fluid.
This happened, moreover, despite the fact that Texas law permits abortions when a patient “has a life-threatening physical condition” or faces a “serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function” that relates to their pregnancy.
Incidents like this are common because many state legal provisions permitting emergency abortions have never been interpreted by any court, or have been interpreted largely by Republican judges who are hostile to abortion. So hospital lawyers often cannot know in advance when their state’s courts will allow doctors to perform an abortion, and doctors who guess wrong risk very serious criminal charges.
If the Supreme Court reads EMTALA to say what it actually says in Moyle, that would relieve some of this uncertainty. It would mean that doctors or patients who cannot obtain a state court order permitting an emergency abortion could also seek such an order from federal court. It would also mean that, over time, a body of case law would develop establishing when federal law entitles someone experiencing a medical emergency to an abortion.
But all of that depends on whether these justices, a majority of whom voted to overrule Roe v. Wade, will set aside their personal opposition to abortion and read EMTALA to do what it actually says.